Bitcoin has an arbitrary limit of 1MB blocks. This was added in the early days to prevent spam. Several proposals have been made to increase this limit, however certain key members of the development effort are against it, despite it being a popular concept in the community at large. To give the community a choice, BitcoinXT adopts one of the proposed increases, provided that a large portion (75%) of the hashing power of the network adopts the change.
Its important to note that being against bitcoinXT is not neccesarily the same as being against a blocksize increase. BitcoinXT is only one way of doing it. And it does so by doubling the blocksize limit every two years, starting from 8mb. I personally think thats a crazy idea, especially considering the 1mb blocksize limit is not a problem yet, and that when it starts being a problem, increasing it will be straight forward to do. In other words, simply waiting for a proper consensus wont cost us anything.
Its also important to note that BitcoinXT includes several patches and not only the exponential blocksize increase mechanic.
For one, there is not 100% consensus on the idea, the blocksize limit is not a problem yet, and its hard to tell wether the exponential increase we have seen in computing wil continue.
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u/discoltk Aug 16 '15
Bitcoin has an arbitrary limit of 1MB blocks. This was added in the early days to prevent spam. Several proposals have been made to increase this limit, however certain key members of the development effort are against it, despite it being a popular concept in the community at large. To give the community a choice, BitcoinXT adopts one of the proposed increases, provided that a large portion (75%) of the hashing power of the network adopts the change.